Wanted By The Cowboy Tiger (Heroes of Shifter Creek 3) by Clara Moore Page A

embraced the room around them with a gesture. “I’ve done very well. I could live off royalties alone.”
    “I thought that was never the point with you.”
    “Maybe it’s the point now. Maybe this is my last book.”
    “ What ?”
    “Look, I don’t know, all right?” Tristan finally snapped, his own frustration showing. “I’m going through some things, and I need my books to be dark in order to vent them out. If you and Derek and the whole fucking world don’t like it, then so be it. It’s not my problem.”
    “It is your problem!” Sharee argued, incredulous. “Do you really want to throw it all away?”
    “I want to write in peace!” he all but roared.
    Sharee blinked. She stared at him, stunned by the rage she could feel radiating off of him.
    “What’s it to you, anyway?” Tristan asked after a few moments of dumbfounded silence.
    “What’s it to me?” Sharee repeated. She felt like this conversation was rapidly and inexorably getting out of hand. “I care about you,” she said honestly. “ That ’s what it is to me.”
    “You care about me. That’s nice.” Tristan snorted. “I fucking love you.”
    Sharee looked at him. She watched as the realization of what he had just said washed over him. His eyes widened and his skin paled. He looked like the proverbial deer caught in the highlights.
    “I…” Sharee tried to talk. Her voice wouldn’t come. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
    Tristan swallowed visibly. “I think you should go,” he said after a moment.
    “What?”
    “Go home for the day. I think we both need to take a beat.”
    “I don’t want to take a beat. I want to understand just what the hell is going on here.” There was no heat in Sharee’s voice, just utter shock.
    Tristan sighed. He looked very tired all of a sudden. “Please, darlin’. Please, just leave for the day. We’ll talk more tomorrow, I promise.”
    Sharee didn’t have the heart to push him any further. Besides, she was starting to feel like pressing the “pause” button on this conversation was actually a good idea. She nodded and stood. Five minutes later, she was climbing into her car and driving away in the rain, leaving the cottage on the edge of the forest in her rearview mirror.
    ***
    End of the sample, you can read the rest of the book by clicking on the cover or by going to this link .
     

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Protected and Taken by the Alpha Cowboy
     
     
     
     
     
     
    By: C. J. Rivers
     

There were fifteen pickup trucks parked in front of Loma Rita’s tiny town hall. It had been a long time since any of those trucks had seen a dealer’s showroom. They were dented and scratched from long years of working in South Texas. There was scraps of hay and gravel in nearly every bed; a few had lost their tailgates.
    The cowboys standing in a cluster near these trucks didn’t look much better. Years spent in the saddle had turned their skin leathery-brown; most had a perpetual squint lurking in the shadows underneath their Stetsons. They wore blue jeans that had seen much better days and faded t-shirts.
    “It’s just bullshit, that’s what it is,” Millet Baynard proclaimed. He was one of the bigger cowboys, although far from the brightest. His t-shirt proclaimed his Longhorn pride. He was known in town for his ability to flatten beer cans against his forehead; his record was sixty cans smashed in a single minute. “Who cares about frikkin’ bats, anyway?”
    “They’re an endangered species,” Danny Russell, tall, soft-spoken, and acting chair of the town board sighed. “That means the feds have got their nose in it, and there’s really nothing we can do.” He looked slowly around the assembled crowd, making sure to catch each cowboy’s eye in turn. “Roger can spend years appealing this decision, but the law is what the law is. They’re not going to let him develop anything down there. It’s all protected